Jerusalem’s stranger

Poet Dennis Silk was an observer, holy visitor and resident ghost in the Holy City.

Dennis Silk in Abu Tor, Jerusalem in the early ‘90s.
(photo credit:AVIGAIL SCHIMMEL)

The cover photo of “A Cloud Inhaled Me” shows the mournful, ethereal face of Dennis Silk (1928-1998), hands upraised, as if imploring some unseen aggressor not to shoot.It is the face of a poet whose home in Abu Tor, along the west-east divide in Jerusalem, was the occupied territory of hand puppets and wind-up toys, and whose poems could be bracingly playful, even his poems about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, his thorny inheritance as an immigrant from the UK at age 27.